Every prospect wants to know why they should buy from you. They want to know the outcome they will experience before they want to know how you will create those outcomes. Let’s start with four basic facts …

1. Every prospect has a problem. This problem creates some negative emotions.

2. Every product has features: Features are merely objective facts about a product (or the company behind it). In three-dimensional products, features include size, shape, weight, construction, color options and more. You need to be able to tell your prospect the feature of your product or service that will solve the problem. In information products, features include number of pages, size, frequency of publication (for periodicals) and the types of information that are presented.

3. Fortunately, most features are there for a darned good reason: Prospects don’t want features. They want you to change their lives for the better. Product features are merely the means to that end. That means features can have a place in ad copy – like telling prospects how many issues they’ll get per year … how many big pages are in your book … or that your widget is made from carbon steel for strength or carbon fiber for lightness.

Beyond that, features are a yawn because they’re about the product; not about the prospect. Or, as in the examples above, they can help demonstrate how your product delivers a benefit. The good news is, just about every product fact – every feature – is there to provide a benefit that your prospect IS willing to pay for. Tell your prospect in no uncertain terms the benefits of a particular feature. But we do not want to stop there.

4. Each benefit has a positive emotional outcome for the buyer. Many time there are more benefits associated with each product feature than are obvious to the average buyer. Each benefit or combination of benefits producing one, two, three or more new benefits you never thought about before. The secret to selling and marketing and most any other revenue generating activity is to identify each and every benefit a product provides – and the emotional outcome your buyer will experience.

5. Your prospect is buying emotionally first, then they intellectualize & justify the purchase. Connecting the feature, benefits and outcomes makes it very easy for the buying to understand why you are the right and safe choice.

Outcome that sing and soar – in five simple steps

Here’s a little exercise to help you drill down to the outcomes prospects are willing to pay for and then connect those benefits with powerful response-boosting emotions that your prospect already has about those benefits (or the lack of them) in his life.

By the time you’re through, you will have a complete list of company and product features … you will have squeezed every possible benefit out of those features … you will have fully defined the outcomes of those benefits and you will have connected each one to a powerful emotion your prospect has about each one of them.

In short, you’ll have a comprehensive “features/benefits/emotional outcome” inventory you can refer to as you create your marketing message, write your copy, build your sales presentation or create contents for your website.

Going through this exercise can go a long way towards finding new themes and adding power to your sales and marketing.

To begin, create a spreadsheet with these headings:

Problem

Negative Emotional Outcomes of Problem

Feature that Solves the Problem

Tangible Benefits of that Feature

Positive Emotional Outcome Prospect with Experience

Rank

Write until all know problems are identified and documented. Document how they feel when they experience this problem. Next write the feature of your product or service that solves the problem and document the benefit of that feature. Finally, describe the positive emotional outcome the buyer will experience.

When complete, rank them in order of importance.

He is an example of what your table should look like.

Problem: Sales have plateaued

Emotional Impact of Problem: So frustrated because no matter what I do, I just can’t figure out how to take the sales to the next level. And I’m always the one having to do the sales

Feature: Learn how to build a sales and marketing system

Benefit of Feature: You can stop being the only “sales guy” and start leveraging your marketing and sales processes so that customers come to you to purchase, instead of you chasing them. You will grow sales!

Emotional Outcome: You’ll feel a great sense of relief … no more anxiety about “where is the next sale going to come from?” and you won’t have to be chasing prospective customers all the time … prospects who are hiding from you.

When you complete this process you will have all the material you need to write a great sales letter, create compelling web copy, and build a powerful sales presentation and some much more.

This process is where increase profits and grow sales begins. You need to understand your prospects better than they understand themselves. When completed, you can tell them exactly what they can expect when they work with you.

If you want a more detailed, step by step process, go to www.businessgrowthexperience.com and download our free report: Six Questions Your Prospects Want Answered before They Buy.

p.s. Go to www.businessgrowthexperience.net and supply your email address. We will notify you when we launch our membership site that will take you step by step through our sales and marketing system to help you grow sales and increase revenues.

Most people are not excited to see a sales rep walk into their office. Defenses go up almost immediately.

This is strange to me because I get more new ideas, market intelligence and industry news from the sales reps who visit my office than from other places.

They see so many more people than I do.

They visit so many more companies that I do.

They see what others are doing that works.

They see what others do that doesn’t work.

Being a good sales rep is not just about selling your product or service. It is about helping the people you meet be more successful.

On a side note, there was a study done on what customers want from their sales rep. This study indicated that the customer wants accountability from the sales rep. In different words, they want the rep to be accountable for the success the customer will achieve when they buy the product or service.

Next time a sales rep comes into you office ask them how they are accountable for the overall success of the product or service. In our sales training we offer a 100% return on investment guarantee. We want to be held accountable. Want to learn more? Call me, Ron Finklestein, at 330-990-0788 or email me at ron@businessgrowthexperience.com

We all belong to the human race. It is a simple sentence and a statement of fact. There are many assumptions made in that statement. One of the primary assumptions is we belong to the human race. Because of our membership in this august society, we know how to build safe, effective, successful and lasting personal and business relationships that allow all parties involved to grow, prosper and get results.

I am not sure this is a valid assumption.

Why? Though we have much in common, many of us have not been taught know how to build rapport, connect with others, understand the best way to support others and know how to ask them to support us. This is evident by the divorce rate; as many as 50% of marriages end in a divorce (Source divorcerate.org.) What is interesting to me is that the divorce rate drops the older we get. For example the divorce rate is 38.8% for American males age 20-24 versus 6.5% for American males age 35-39. It would seem the old men get the more they understand relationship strategies.

The question is how can we shorten that learning curve?

In business, according to Grant Thornton, 97% of all business owners want to strengthen the customer relationship.

SCORE suggests that 64% of all small businesses fail because they do not know how nor do they understand the value of marketing. Marketing is nothing more than a process through which companies build strong customer relationships. Can you imagine how simple life can become when you understand this and implement relationship strategies in your business?

I could go on but you get my drift.

To address this problem, I teamed up with Dr. Tony Alessandra, one of the world’s foremost relationships strategies experts, to create a web site that teaches you how to build safe, effective, successful and lasting personal and business relationships. The web site is called People Smarts. In this site we address relationship strategy issues, presentations skills, collaborative selling skills, marketing, personal growth and development, how to treat people the way they want to be treated and a host of other important and powerful topics that, when applied, will help you create more effective relationships to get the results you want and need. The site contains a full array of videos, eBooks, PDFs and MP3 to support you in your personal, sales, business and leadership development needs.

We invite you to explore and try out this site. In lesson one (which you have access) you will learn the different between the Golden Rule vs. Platinum Rule and experience the overview of all functions of relationship strategies. In addition, you will receive an introduction of the two dimensions of behavior. In this lesson, you will be presented with a very simple model that has been validated with hundreds of thousands of people. It is a powerful guide you can use to improve communication and morale, build better work groups, and develop better relationships with co-workers, supervisors, customers, vendors and others.

I invite you to give People Smarts a try. To learn more go to www.akris.net. If you have questions please feel free to call Ron Finklestein at 330-990-0788 or email him at ron@akris.net. This powerful tool can also be used in you place of business for all your employees. If you would like more details about this opportunity ask Ron and he will provide the details.

Most people think it is through the spoken word. That is partly true. There are three components to effective communication. The words we use only account for 7 % of any message. For an effective communication to take place, of course, we need all three parts of the message and they must be congruent and consistent with each other. If there isn’t any congruency, the receiver will be confused and will have a tendency to accept the predominant form of communication rather than the literal meaning or words.

The second part of the message where meaning is implied is the emphasis and tone of our voice. This is 36% of the meaning of our communications. The emphasis and tone have the power to completely change the message that is being communicated. Often, you will say something to a person and they may become offended. When you express that the words you used were intended to be inoffensive, the other person will tell you that it was your tone of voice that was the issue.

The last component of our message is our body language. A whopping 57% of the meaning is convey through body language. You can dramatically increase the effect of your communication by leaning toward the speaker or shifting your weight forward onto the balls of your feet. If you can face the person directly and give them direct eye contact, combined with fully focused attention, you double the impact of what you’re saying.

If you want to learn more about effective communication please check out http://www.akris.net. Here we teach effective communication strategies to help you build better relationships, increase sales, become better leaders and help you grow personally and professionally.

As a professional speaker, I am often asked what topics I speak about. That is easy to answer because I can speak on:

entrepreneurship, small business skills, marketing and most any topic relating to small business skills and small business success.

The common thread tying all my topics together is called The One Degree Difference. We must learn to think differently about our business in order to get different results.

My book Nine Principles for Inspired Action discusses the nine behaviors succussful people implement and there are examples of how people learn to think differently and how this change in thinking leads to different actions.

The One Degree Difference simply stated is that it does not require a massive change to get massive results. It only takes a small change in our thinking, a one degree change, to get massive results.

Change your thinking change your business.

Ron Finklestein

Small Business Speaker330-990-0788ron@akris.net

Contact me to see how you can learn more about the One Degree Difference.

As someone who speaks on topics of interest to small business owners, I have found entrepreneurship to be of the greatest interest. An associate once told me that 65% of all small businesses started are one person companies.

This means there is a strong interest in taking control of their financial destiny but many times these new business owners trade one job for the many jobs required of running a small business: sales, marketing, bookkeeper, customer service, etc.

It is hard to be successful as an entrepreneur unless you have the success mindset. We are not taught to be a business owner in school and the business owners I know who have MBAs found that it is very difficult to applly what is learned in a college course designed for Fortune 1000 companies.

Who fills that gap between what was learned in school and how it is applied in the trenches? Someone has to. It can be filled in two ways: ongoing training and personal improvement and working with a coach, mentor or ideally a group of advisors. Working with someone else is where the best small business ideas can be tested before the wrong decision is made.